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Types et al as accessibility tools for the ADHD brain

I ended up with a fair number of references for my talks at Software You Can Love and LambdaDays 2024 on how I use various tools and techniques to compensate for my late diagnosed ADHD.

I'll update the page with links to recordings of the talks once they exist (the two versions will share slides but have slightly different focus on where I spend the time).

Now, the list of links!

About ADHD

"How to ADHD" has lots of material on what ADHD is, how it manifests, and what you can do about it: https://howtoadhd.com/

A paper reviewing research on working memory in adults with ADHD: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-16996-001

Mads Torgersen (lead designer of C# at Microsoft) talks about his own diagnosis on the No Dogma Podcast: https://nodogmapodcast.bryanhogan.net/165-mads-torgersen-adhd/

(Bonus extra: that last link has more links to more ADHD resources)

Finally, I mentioned at one point an organization tool that happens to mesh fairly well with my own variant of ADHD called SkedPal: https://skedpal.com/. You prioritize tasks in advance, and assign them to "time maps" (i.e. these times are work times, these times are home times). Then you hit the button and it suggests a calendar of tasks. I've found it useful because it allows things like "this task is important to me but it doesn't matter when it is done" and "this task isn't very important but if I'm going to do it, it needs happen by Friday" and it will suggest a sane next thing to do. And when you (inevitably) fail to actually follow the plan, you just hit the button again and it suggests a new plan based on the things you actually did rather than the things it thought you were going to do. Caveat: it's not free software, and it does charge a monthly fee.

Evidence (or not) of my favourite programming techniques being better

Dan Luu's tour de force review of research into whether or not strong typing leads to more reliable code: https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/

Brian Marick has a well thought out post on why he's not fully convinced by property based testing: https://www.crustofcode.com/a-reluctant-rebuttal/. Most importantly he links to a paper written in 1990 that partition testing has some issues, all of which would also apply to property based testing: https://www.site.uottawa.ca/~gvj/papers/Software%20Engineering%20IEEE%20Transactions%20on%201990%20Hamlet.pdf. It is worth noting that both Marick (about PBT), and Hamlet and Taylor (about partition testing) do state that they see use cases for these testing methods, but that they do also have concerns.

The arguments I've heard against domain driven design have tended to be more anecdotal but mostly boil down to: "you're making the code harder to understand by forcing developers to understand both the code and the specialist terminology of the users at the same time."

Going deeper on Property Based Testing

I happen to be a fan of Scott Wlaschin's video and blog posts at https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/pbt/ titled "The lazy programmer's guide to writing 1000's of tests".

Otherwise, a quick google search for "John Hughes" will net you many talks from the author of the first property based testing framework.

Fuzz testing is a related topic which somewhat overlaps, but with a different focus.

Leaning into union types, and domain driven design

I cannot over stress how amazing a book "Domain Modeling Made Functional" is (again, by Scott Wlaschin) https://pragprog.com/titles/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-functional/. There is also a talk covering the basics available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlPQ0FsPxPY.

Pushing the boundaries on types

Probably the place to start is the Idris programming language https://www.idris-lang.org/